Black Holes as Atoms

Stationary spacetimes containing a black hole have several properties akin to those of atoms. For instance, such spacetimes have only three classical degrees of freedom, or observables, which may be taken to be the mass, the angular momentum, and the electric charge of the hole. There are several arguments supporting a proposal originally made by Bekenstein that quantization of these classical degrees of freedom gives an equal spacing for the horizon area spectrum of black holes. We review some of these arguments and introduce a specific Hamiltonian quantum theory of black holes. Our Hamiltonian quantum theory gives, among other things, a discrete spectrum for the classical observables, and it produces an area spectrum which is closely related to Bekenstein's proposal. We also present a foamlike model of horizons of spacetime. In our model spacetime horizon consists of microscopic Schwarzschild black holes. Applying our Hamiltonian approach to this model we find that the entropy of any horizon is one quarter of its area.     

Quantum field theory in black hole-type spacetimes with horizons

Using quantum field theory in black hole-type spacetimes with horizons, which includes all the black hole solutions and also some other interesting solutions in general relativity, we obtain Hawking's thermal spectrum of Dirac particles near the event horizon as well as the cosmological horizon of the spacetime.     

Charged Particles’ Hawking Radiation via Tunneling of Both Horizons from Reissner-Nordström-Taub-NUT Black Holes

In some recent derivations thermal characters of the inner horizon have been employed; however, the understanding of possible role that may play the inner horizons of black holes in black hole thermodynamics is still somewhat incomplete. Motivated by this problem we investigate Hawking radiation of the Reissner-Nordström-Taub-NUT (RNTN) black hole by considering thermal characters of both the outer and inner horizons. We apply Damour-Ruffini method and the thin film brick wall model to calculate the temperature and the entropy of the inner horizon of the RNTN black hole. The inner horizon admits thermal character with positive temperature and entropy proportional to its area, and it thus may contribute to the total entropy of the black hole in the context of Nernst theorem. Considering conservations of energy and charge and the back-reaction of emitting particles to the spacetime, the emission spectra are obtained for both the inner and outer horizons. The total emission rate is the product of the emission rates of the inner and outer horizons, and it deviates from the purely thermal spectrum and can bring some information out. Thus, the result can be treated as an explanation to the information loss paradox.     

Charged Dirac Particles’ Hawking Radiation via Tunneling of Both Horizons and Thermodynamics Properties of Kerr–Newman–Kasuya–Taub–NUT–AdS Black Holes

We investigate Hawking radiation of electrically and magnetically charged Dirac particles from a dyonic Kerr–Newman–Kasuya–Taub–NUT–Anti-de Sitter (KNKTN–AdS) black hole by considering thermal characters of both the outer and inner horizons. We apply Damour–Ruffini method and membrane method to calculate the temperature and the entropy of the inner horizon of the KNKTN–AdS black hole. The inner horizon admits thermal character with positive temperature and entropy proportional to its area. The inner horizon entropy contributes to the total entropy of the black hole in the context of Nernst theorem. Considering conservation of energy, charges, angular momentum, and the back-reaction of emitting particles to the spacetime, we obtain the emission spectra for both the inner and outer horizons. The total emission rate is obtained as the product of the emission rates of the inner and outer horizons. It deviates from the purely thermal spectrum with the leading term exactly the Boltzman factor and can bring some information out. The result thus can be treated as an explanation to the information loss paradox.     

Pure States Don't Wear Black

Recently, string theory has provided some remarkable new insights into the microphysics of black holes. I argue that a simple and important lesson is also provided with regards to the information loss paradox, namely, pure quantum states do not form black holes! Thus it seems black hole formation, as well as evaporation, must be understood within the framework of quantum decoherence.     

Entropy is conserved in Hawking radiation as tunneling: A revisit of the black hole information loss paradox

We revisit in detail the paradox of black hole information loss due to Hawking radiation as tunneling. We compute the amount of information encoded in correlations among Hawking radiations for a variety of black holes, including the Schwarzchild black hole, the Reissner–Nordström black hole, the Kerr black hole, and the Kerr–Newman black hole. The special case of tunneling through a quantum horizon is also considered. Within a phenomenological treatment based on the accepted emission probability spectrum from a black hole, we find that information is leaked out hidden in the correlations of Hawking radiation. The recovery of this previously unaccounted for information helps to conserve the total entropy of a system composed of a black hole plus its radiations. We thus conclude, irrespective of the microscopic picture for black hole collapsing, the associated radiation process: Hawking radiation as tunneling, is consistent with unitarity as required by quantum mechanics.     

Black hole entropy and the modified uncertainty principle: A heuristic analysis

Recently Ali et al. (2009) proposed a Generalized Uncertainty Principle (or GUP) with a linear term in momentum (accompanied by Plank length). Inspired by this idea here we calculate the quantum corrected value of a Schwarzschild black hole entropy and a Reissner-Nordström black hole with double horizon by utilizing the proposed generalized uncertainty principle. We find that the leading order correction goes with the square root of the horizon area contributing positively. We also find that the prefactor of the logarithmic contribution is negative and the value exactly matches with some earlier existing calculations. With the Reissner-Nordström black hole we see that this model-independent procedure is not only valid for single horizon spacetime but also valid for spacetimes with inner and outer horizons.     

Propagation of vacuum polarized photons in topological black hole spacetimes

The one-loop effective action for QED in curved spacetime contains equivalence principle violating interactions between the electromagnetic field and the spacetime curvature. These interactions lead to a dependence of the photon velocity on the motion and polarization directions. In this paper we investigate the gravitational analogue to the electromagnetic birefringence phenomenon in the static and radiating topological black hole backgrounds. For the static topological black hole spacetimes, the velocity shift of photons is the same as that in Reissner-Nordström black holes. This reflects the fact that the propagation of vacuum polarized photons is not sensitive to the asymptotic behavior and topological structure of spacetimes. For the massless topological black hole and BTZ black hole, the light cone condition remains unchanged. In the radiating topological black hole backgrounds, the light cone condition is changed even for the radially directed photons. The velocity shifts depend on the topological structures. Due to the null fluid, the velocity shift of photons no longer vanishes at the apparent horizons as well as the event horizons. However, the “polarization sum rule” is still valid.     

The dangers of extremes

While extreme black hole spacetimes with smooth horizons are known at the level of mathematics, we argue that the horizons of physical extreme black holes are effectively singular. Test particles encounter a singularity the moment they cross the horizon, and only objects with significant back-reaction can fall across a smooth (now non-extreme) horizon. As a result, classical interior solutions for extreme black holes are theoretical fictions that need not be reproduced by any quantum mechanical model. This observation suggests that significant quantum effects might be visible outside extreme or nearly extreme black holes. It also suggests that the microphysics of such black holes may be very different from that of their Schwarzschild cousins.     

Virtual Black Holes and Space–Time Structure

In the standard formalism of quantum gravity, black holes appear to form statistical distributions of quantum states. Now, however, we can present a theory that yields pure quantum states. It shows how particles entering a black hole can generate firewalls, which however can be removed, replacing them by the ‘footprints’ they produce in the out-going particles. This procedure can preserve the quantum information stored inside and around the black hole. We then focus on a subtle but unavoidable modification of the topology of the Schwarzschild metric: antipodal identification of points on the horizon. If it is true that vacuum fluctuations include virtual black holes, then the structure of space-time is radically different from what is usually thought.     

Quantization of the Interior Schwarzschild Black Hole

We study a Hamiltonian quantum formalism of a spherically symmetric space-time which can be identified with the interior of a Schwarzschild black hole. The phase space of this model is spanned by two dynamical variables and their conjugate momenta. It is shown that the classical Lagrangian of the model gives rise the interior metric of a Schwarzschild black hole. We also show that the mass of such a system is a Dirac observable and then by quantization of the model by Wheeler-DeWitt approach and constructing suitable wave packets we get the mass spectrum of the black hole.     

视界和温度格林函数的生成泛函

在平衡态条件下,利用格林函数的欧氏生成泛函讨论了具有视界的Rindler时空和黑洞时空中量子场温度的几何来源。在Minkowski时空到Rindler时空的变换下,绝对零度格林函数欧氏生成泛函的路径积分表示变换为有限温度量子场的相应表示,说明Minkowski真空态和Rindler时空中的一量子混合态性质相同,导出了这个态的温度格林函数及各热力学格林函数。对于Schwarzschild,Reissner-Nordstrom和Kerr黑洞,得到了类似的结果,并获得了描写量子混合态的统计算符的具体形式。 关键词：     

引力彩虹时空中Kerr黑洞的熵谱和面积谱

利用黑洞的绝热不变性,研究了引力彩虹时空中Kerr黑洞的熵谱和面积谱.首先,在引力彩虹时空背景下,计算了Kerr黑洞的绝热不变作用量,并将其与玻尔-索末菲量子化条件相结合,给出了黑洞的熵谱.得到的熵谱没有引力彩虹时空本身具有的粒子能量依赖性,且是与经典Kerr黑洞中原始贝肯斯坦熵谱相同的等间距熵谱.然后,根据黑洞热力学第一定律和黑洞熵谱,给出了与原始贝肯斯坦谱不同的面积谱.该面积谱是非等间距的,而且有对黑洞面积的依赖性,但不依赖于探测粒子的能量.面积谱表明,随着黑洞面积的减少,面积间隔逐步变小;当黑洞达到普朗克尺度时,面积量子可降为零.这表示黑洞面积不再减少,黑洞出现辐射剩余.而在忽略色散关系的修正效应或在大黑洞极限下,面积谱的修正项可以忽略,引力彩虹Kerr黑洞面积谱可以回归到原始贝肯斯坦谱.此外,对引力彩虹时空Kerr黑洞的熵进行了讨论,得到了带有面积倒数修正项的黑洞熵,分析了黑洞熵的量子修正与面积谱量子修正的一致性.     

The information paradox: Conflicts and resolutions

Many relativists have been long convinced that black hole evaporation leads to information loss or remnants. String theorists have however not been too worried about the issue, largely due to a belief that the Hawking argument for information loss is flawed in its details. A recently derived inequality shows that the Hawking argument for black holes with horizon can in fact be made rigorous. What happens instead is that in string theory, black hole microstates have no horizons. Thus the evolution of radiation quanta with E??kT is modified by order unity at the horizon, and we resolve the information paradox.     

A Generalization of Hawking’s Black Hole Topology Theorem to Higher Dimensions

Hawking’s theorem on the topology of black holes asserts that cross sections of the event horizon in 4-dimensional asymptotically flat stationary black hole spacetimes obeying the dominant energy condition are topologically 2-spheres. This conclusion extends to outer apparent horizons in spacetimes that are not necessarily stationary. In this paper we obtain a natural generalization of Hawking’s results to higher dimensions by showing that cross sections of the event horizon (in the stationary case) and outer apparent horizons (in the general case) are of positive Yamabe type, i.e., admit metrics of positive scalar curvature. This implies many well-known restrictions on the topology, and is consistent with recent examples of five dimensional stationary black hole spacetimes with horizon topology S ² × S ¹. The proof is inspired by previous work of Schoen and Yau on the existence of solutions to the Jang equation (but does not make direct use of that equation).     

The research on the quantum tunneling characteristics and the radiation spectrum of the stationary axisymmetric black hole

At the event horizon and the cosmological horizon of the stationary axisymmetric Kerr-Newman black hole in the de Sitter space-time background, the tunneling rate of the charged particles is relevant with Bekenstein-Hawking entropy and the real radiation spectrum is not strictly pure thermal, but consistent with the underlying unitary theory in quantum mechanics. This is a feasible interpretation for the paradox of the black hole information loss. Taking the self-gravitation action, energy conservation, angular momentum conservation and charge conservation into account, the derived radiation spectrum is a correct amendment to the Hawking pure thermal spectrum.     

Black holes and quantum coherence

We attempt to gain some insight into the issue of whether pure states evolve to density matrices in the black hole evaporation process by examining the mode functions of the particles entering the black hole which are correlated with the particles which escape to infinity. We show that these particles enter the black hole singularity at relatively early times. This tends to support the view that pure states evolve to density matrices, i.e., that in this process quantum coherence is lost.     

Tunneling into fuzzball states

String theory suggests that black hole microstates are quantum, horizon sized ‘fuzzballs’, rather than smooth geometries with horizon. Radiation from fuzzballs can carry information and does not lead to information loss. But if we let a shell of matter collapse then it creates a horizon, and it seems that subsequent radiation will lead to information loss. We argue that the resolution to this problem is that the shell can tunnel to the fuzzball configurations. The amplitude for tunneling is small because we are relating two macroscopically different configurations, but the number of states that we can tunnel to, given through the Bekenstein entropy, is very large. These small and large numbers can cancel each other, making it possible for the shell to tunnel into fuzzball states before a significant amount of radiation has been emitted. This offers a way to resolve the information paradox.